AMD to seize share in pro graphics market

As we reported earlier, AMD scored a major coup with the new Mac Pro. The lovely bucket from Cupertino features AMD graphics, which came as a surprise in many circles, as Nvidia is the dominant player in the professional graphics market.

The high-profile design win is expected to generate quite a bit of cash for AMD’s professional graphics business and it will also help boost its unimpressive market share. AMD currently holds about a fifth of the market, so for every FirePro card sold Nvidia manages to ship about four Quadros.

According to Digitimes, this will change next year. AMD could bump its share up to 30 percent by the end of 2014, thanks to Apple. Since we are talking about high-margin products, they should also boost AMD’s overall profitability in 2014.

AMD’s new FirePro S10000 and Sky series server products are competitive, too. They use PCI Express Gen 3, while Nvidia’s Tesla K20C is on PCI Express Gen 2. AMD uses OpenCL, while Nvidia uses its own proprietary CUDA platform.

In addition, AMD has a habit of pricing its professional products more aggressively than Nvidia. Earlier this year we were told by some AMD reps that the company hopes to gain ground in the professional space, but then again AMD has been saying that for years. This time around AMD seems to have a good chance of eroding Nvidia’s lead. However, Nvidia won't take this lying down.